Gauteng MEC of Education Matome Chiloane announced that placement offers would be sent to the parents of 157,407 Grade 1 and 168,457 Grade 8 applicants, starting on Monday.
Around 828,364 applications for 2025 admission were received.
“From these applications, 344,890 were submitted by unique applications, which are individual parents, guardians or children,” Chiloane said.
“As a result, from the unique applications, 325,858 were complete applications while 19,032 were incomplete applications.”
Chiloane was speaking at the Bryanston High School on Sunday, while providing an update on the department's online admissions for next year.
He said when the applications closed on August 14, they had received a total of 824,634 applications, with 353,409 for Grade 1 and 474,955 Grade 8, while unique applications were 344,890.
He said the department is currently on the process of finalising and processing the complete applications, to be able to offer them spaces.
“The incomplete ones, we are going to put them aside and we are not going to offer them a space or place them. We will only consider them when we are done with the completed applications,” said Chiloane.
He said the parents of 157,407 Grade 1 and 168,457 Grade 8 applicants will receive messages of placement offers starting on Monday.
Chiloane said there will be two messages of placement, one of accepting the offer and another for provisionally acceptance.
"As we get those offers coming in, a parent can accept the offer as final in the system, but parents who choose the option of provisionally accepting, which is also fine, because we do not want to disadvantage parents, they can provisionally accept the offer, meaning that space allocated for that child will be kept by the system awaiting other offers.”
He said the waiting period will take about two weeks or so, while waiting for the other offers.
“By that time, you would be able to see that all the other schools would have reached capacity or not, and then the child will be placed there in the provisionally accepted offer," said Chiloane.
He said if parents have accepted the provisionally accepted offer, they will have 14 days to decide and seven days to accept the space.
“If you don't accept the offer within those seven days, the child will be automatically accepted and placed at the school.”
Chiloane said not all parents will receive the messages of placement offers, but urged them to check on the department’s website to check and confirm the offers.
“The majority of the parents will get the messages, but I urge parents to check the website because sometimes the system might not send you the message, but the placement is there on the system,” he said.
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